It's disappointing to hear about Superman Returns in HD. I was kind of looking forward to it. Even if the film was boring, like some people complained, I thought it could at least be a showcase for my system, being shot digitally and all. Rats.

Quote:It's disappointing to hear about Superman Returns in HD. I was kind of looking forward to it. Even if the film was boring, like some people complained, I thought it could at least be a showcase for my system, being shot digitally and all. Rats.

C.V.

That's exactly why it looks so bad. It was shot on a 1920x1080 HD camera. That may sound wiz-bang, but if you compare that to film...35mm film has about six times the resolution of HD. Far, far better contrast, and superior color depth.

HD is nice, but you can't expect it to compete with something originally shot on film.

Quote:Well if you already have Superman in SD, I wouldn’t pick up the HD version unless you have twenty five bucks just burning a hole in your pocket. Even running the X1 through my video processor didn’t make it look at that much better than SD.

We watched the HD Excalibur last night. They did a pretty good job with the transfer and video looked very good compared to SD. I was disappointed in the sound though. I think someone forgot the .1 in the 5.1 DTS. There wasn’t any LFE at all. But if anyone is a fan of this movie, it’s worth picking up.

I dont agree with this at all, while not the best looking HD DVD the picture quality was great. Just got the PS3 and rented Black Hawk Down from Netflix,from what I hear one of the best Blu-Ray yet.

> HD is nice, but you can't expect it to compete with> something originally shot on film.

Yet. And yes, I realize film has the equivalent of a much greater resolution than digital so far, but I didn't think that would matter on a home theater. I'm not using an analog projector. I have a digital television. You'd think something shot digitally at the resolution my TV is capable of outputting would make more sense than film resized and converted.

Quote:> HD is nice, but you can't expect it to compete with> something originally shot on film.

Yet. And yes, I realize film has the equivalent of a much greater resolution than digital so far, but I didn't think that would matter on a home theater. I'm not using an analog projector. I have a digital television. You'd think something shot digitally at the resolution my TV is capable of outputting would make more sense than film resized and converted.

C.V.

Keep this in mind. Pretty much anything that is done digitally has some sort of compression applied to it. (I am sure that someone will point out the one or two cases where it isn't.) MP3's are a good example. People RAVE about the sound of their MP3 player, yet they are raving about a highly compressed audio sample. CDs are compressed audio too (a lot of people forget that).

Same with video. DVD's are compressed video, thus the artifacts and grainy video you see many times (caused during the transfer process from film to digital and then the compression algorythms). While a 1080p version of video may match up nicely to your TV (if that is the native resolution of it), the original recording is, dare I say, limited to only 1080 lines of resolution. Considerably less than film. So when the transfer happens to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, it still gets compressed (you know that even the original "file size" of the full movie is WAY more than what would fit on one disc of either format), but it is compressing a 1080 image, not something at a much greater (film) resolution, so you "miss" some of the details that get "compressed out" of the final transfer for viewing at home.

Another way to look at it is that you can only get a final product as good as the starting product times X (X being a compression percentage shown as a decimal). So if you start with a film at (say 6 times 1080, or 6480), mulitply it by (making up a number here) 65% or .65 to represent the amount of compression applied to it to get it to fit on the end media, you end up with 4212 as some "quality/resolution" number. By that, it obviously gets compressed down to 1080 (or lower), but has the slight nuances of the higher resolution source. Kind of like what people say they get with analog audio. You play some analog music through an analog (good ol' vacuum tubes, or whatever), and you will hear reports of a "warmer" sound, or that you can hear "more" of the nuances to the original recording. Those are all lost with compression, and if you start with a compressed input, your further compressed output will always be less than what your analog (audio) or film final output would be.

The one other point I'd bring up is that movies aren't just shot, cut and delivered. Film doesn't have a "resolution" per se, it has a frame size and a grain size. The bigger the frame (IMAX vs 8mm, anyone?) and the tighter the grain on the stock, the better the result. By the time all the layers of editing (wire/rod removal, rotoscoping, matting, CG effects, digital painting, etc) are done, it's not the same animal.

Take an extreme case. I'm shooting "the Good, the Bad and the Ugly"... I have a long shot of Clint grimacing, in post I realize that, oh hell, it would be insanely cool to push in on Clint's face - forehead to jaw. Shot digital, I'm probably looking at a 320x180 portion of the image. Shot on film, I'm looking at probably an 8mm x 4.5mm portion of the film (depending on gates, film format - Super 35 or Panavision, etc)...

While the film may get grainy and soft and look like what it's become (8mm film), it will still appear better than the 0.06 megapixel digital shot.